The Sydney Morning Herald has a great story today about a criminal lawyer who was harassed by police, and then, when she made a complaint, had evidence falsified against her.

I personally know of one other person who had this happen to them, and, in their case, exonerating evidence (that the police knew existed) was also stolen (likely by the ex-police security gaurds who were involved in the original evidence).

It’s great to read a story about someone who has fought against police bullying, and won.

Thanks to Inside the mind of Tim for pointing out this post over at classically liberal about the number of young teenagers who are on the (publically available) sex offenders registers in the US.

It is truly sad to scroll down the page and see the many mugshots of children who have been placed on a list of sex offenders, to be labelled so for life.

One particularly shocking part of the post is the “Age profile of American Sex Offenders” graph: It shows that 14 is the most common age at which people commit sex offences in America.

Denis Ferguson, possibly Australia’s most infamous paedophile, is also Australia’s least-wanted neighbour.

This man, who served 14 years in gaol for kidnapping and sexually assaulting three children in 1987, is the subject of a media circus that follows a depressing cycle: he moves in, the media search until they find him, the community is whipped (or whip themselves) into a frenzy of outrage, he moves into new accomodation…

The reality is that for better or for worse he has served his time, and no matter where he lives now there will always be children nearby.

While I understand the fear of the parents who live in his neighbourhood, their fear being understandable does not neccessarily make it, or their actions,  justifiable.

As such, the way the media encourage the escalation of the neighbourhood anger is disgraceful. Each time a “resident” (although who knows how close any of these people even live to the man) puts up a sign or does another stunt you can feel the glee as the assembled media pack encourage them in the way you would a performing child.

The actions of some – certainly not all – residents, be it placing signs on his house, delivering coffins to his door or throwing alleged petrol bombs onto his lawn, go too far and should be treated with the same negative reaction by media and police that they would be treated with if they were directed at any other “free” member of society.

This escaltion is only going to end badly – already there have been reports this morning that a man was stabbed outside Mr Ferguson’s house last night – if no-one acts to try and put out this fire rather than just standing by and letting it burn or even actively adding fuel to it.

To see how out-of-hand this paedophile vigilantism can get, we need only to remember the case from 2000 in which a UK paediatrician had her home vandalised  and her windows smashed by angry locals who reportedly “confused the words ‘paediatrician’and ‘paedophile’.”

It revealed that officials will not just look at an individual’s criminal record to decide if they are safe to build up relationships of trust with the young or vulnerable, but will also be allowed to take into account allegations made by former employers or the public, and rule that an applicant appears dangerous because they are unable to build up relationships or if they have a complicated private life.

This issue of child protection versus civil liberties is important, and one that is not going to go away.

While many people find it tempting to say that we should do “anything it takes” to protect children, really, the question asked at the beginning of this article sets up a false dichotomy: It assumes that if we were willing to give up all our civil liberties, we would be able to stamp out child sexual abuse.

This is clearly not true. It is well-known that a child is most likely to be sexually abused by someone they know, and approximately 30% of perpetrators are family members of the victim.

As the US and the UK strengthen their laws surrounding identity checks for people working with children and also the rules that people who have been charged with a sexual crime must obey, I think it is worth thinking about the consequences – both intended and unintended – of such laws.

Now, before you get all up-in-arms about me not thinking about the children, I should clarify that I don’t think the right to liberty over-rules the right to safety, particularly child safety. However, I do think that the laws that are put in place to protect child safety should be subject to oversight and debate and should also be reviewed to see if they actually work.

The Economist recently published an excellent and moving piece of writing about this issue. In America, every state has a rule requiring sex offenders to register on a list and also follow many different rules (such as not living within 100 metres of a playground or school).

Furthermore, as in Australia, the allure of the popularity of “cracking down” on paedophiles is something that is felt by many politicians.

The Economist tells the story of a woman, Wendy Whitaker, who was put on the sex offenders list after having oral sex with her boyfriend when she was 17 and he was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday.

The degree for which she has suffered for her actions is truly heart-breaking. She is now listed on a public register, along with her crime of “sodomy”. She has been incarcerated, had her family home broadcast on local television along with a map explaining how to get there, and been evicted from her home because it was too close to a shopping centre.

The Economist also highlights the extent to which different states and counties have gone to try to protect their citizens from sex offenders: in one case a law was passed banning sex offenders from living within 1000 feet of a school bus stop. The law was overturned when the country sheriff realised he would have to evict nearly 500 people from the town.

“Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally,” the article says.

In America, over 674 000 people are currently on a sex offenders register.

While our laws here in Australia can barely be compared with the American ones (and yet I’m sure we don’t have higher rates of sexual assaults against children), every month or so there are new reports of politicians thinking up new and better ways to crack down on sex offenders.

The question is, do these crack-downs work? And, if they do, are we as a society willing to accept that inevitably there will be people who have been rehabilitated but who never-the-less will have their lives ruined? Or people, such as Wendy Whitaker, who most of us would judge did not even commit much of a crime in the first place, who will suffer the consequences of a stupid mistakes for the rest of their lives?

My instinct is that rather than promising more and more monitoring and tracking of offenders, politicians should be promising more money into research that discovers exactly what works when it comes to protecting children from sexual assault.

“The possibility of Taser use causing or contributing to death is possible and cannot be ruled out,” the review warns.

Despite the fact that Taser International says that Tasers cannot kill – in fact, they have sued medical examiners in the US for finding that Tasers were the cause of death- they do tend to acknowledge that people who are experiencing “excited delirium” may have adverse reactions to being Tasered.

In the case of 39-year old Antonio Galeano, however, Taser international has insisted that, even though he was shot with the stun gun 28 times, it would not have killed him.

There is increasing evidence that Tasers have been linked to deaths across the world.

New Scientist recently reported a study which found that deaths in custody increased 6-fold in California in the year Tasers were introduced, while Amnesty International has an ongoing campaign against the machines.

In fact – because I am looking – most days I see news stories about someone dying after being shot with a Taser. I had originally intended to report these deaths on this blog, but the numbers are so large that I would have to post almost every day on this issue.

While some of these deaths may be coincidental, or (as is likely)  the Taser may only be a contributing factor rather than the whole cause of the death, it is high time that we as a society acknowledge that when we give a police officer a Taser we are giving them an extremely serious and potentially deadly weapon that should only be used in very dangerous situations.

Here is a link (pdf) to the report.

Apparently, the rules would have allowed police to view footage ”for intelligence gathering on individuals and locations” and increased the scope of the program to include all criminal offences except for the use of illicit substances.

While the sydney city council had originally said that the powers had been approved by a steering committe that included a member of the NSW coucil for civil liberties, the civil liberties council later issued a statement saying it had “reservations” about the plan.

Two things come to mind:

Firstly, this is a good example of the relevance of the “slippery slope” argument that is often made by proponents of civil liberties. The cameras are originally put in to help manage big events and street crime and then later they are used to monitor people who haven’t committed a crime and may well be doing legitimate (but disliked by the state) activities such as protesting.

Secondly, where was the NSW council on civil liberties on this one? Good work to Paul Bibby at the Herald but surely this is something that the civil liberties council should be making a fuss about loudly and clearly?

Jennifer Parkhurst’s house was raided yesterday at 7am, and was searched by police for six hours.

Her crime?

She is suspected of photographing and otherwise interacting with dingoes without departmental permission on an unspecified date.

That’s right. She took a photo… of a dingo.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so disturbing. Perhaps Anna Bligh should include dingo-photograhers in her proposed new bikie laws?

In fact, surely dingo-photography is a terrorist act? Wont someone protect us from the Bin Laden of the animal world??

Apparently, under Queensland laws it is illegal for anyone, including news media, to take pictures for gain without government permission. The recording of the activities of Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service officers is also specificially prohibited.

Michael McShane, an ex-police officer and current managing director of the company that produces Jack Daniels (!) wants to ban public drunkeness and give the police resources to enforce this ban.

Giving the police the power to enforce a law that is by it’s very nature ambiguous (there is no real sure way to know someone is drunk as one man’s drunk person is another man’s exhuberant idiot), and then telling them to enforce it in a high-stress high-hostility situation like a city street full of night clubs is just asking for trouble.

But of course, it suits the liquor industry to have the public purse pay for high-visibility policing rather than to have to bear the cost of reduced sales and higher taxes.

David Boaz, the editor of ‘The Libertarian Reader’, describes Libertarianism’s concerns in this way:

“Constraining power is the great challenge for any political system. Libertarians have always put that challenge at the centre of their political and social analysis”.

So what is it about Libertarianism that is so necessarily right-wing? If we take as the central thesis of libertarianism the protection of individual freedom, then it seems to be that to best serve that freedom we should be committed to some notion of self-determination.

In fact, while libertarianism began as a theory concerned with protecting individual autonomy, as it developed the focus on a minimal state and free market capitalism it increasingly sacrificed that goal  in the name of individual property rights.

One of the most influential modern right-libertarians is Robert Nozick. In his seminal book Anarchy, State, and Utopia Nozick set about to establish how, if at all, a state could emerge and function that truly protected individual rights and treated people as ends in themselves.

According to Nozick, taxing people on their earnings is such a violation of their rights that it is akin to aggressing against them:

“Taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor. Some persons find this claim obviously true: taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person; it is like forcing the person to work n hours for another’s purpose. Others find this claim absurd. But even these, if they object to forced labor, would oppose forcing unemployed hippies to work for the benefit of the needy”.

An important concern for Nozick is that others do not use individuals as a ‘means towards an end’: one ought not use another to support one’s own means by redistributing their property.

However, in order to justify property ownership in the first place Nozick relies on the premise that when one person acquires land or resources it is justified because they will use that land productively which will benefit all of society (basically the “trickle-down effect”). So in order to justify private property Nozick must rely on principles that he would reject in the case of taxation!

There are numerous other reasons why the right-libertarian total emphasis on property rights and protection from state power, but not private capital’s power, seems flawed: fundamentally, if we are concerned with protecting individual autonomy, it seems to me that that a mix of positive (freedom to do things) and negative (freedom from unjustified repression) freedom that is facilitated in by both the state and individuals would be most successful at serving this goal.